Phillip Williams - Author
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The question begs... have I done too much or too little with outlining my plot? Well, let's start with this... do you know how your book starts and ends? Do your can your characters feasibly find a solution to the plot? No? Then you haven't done enough of an outline! Put the laptop away, get your pen and paper out and get back to GENERATING MORE IDEAS DAMN-IT! I started writing my book with a really rough outline. I had one ending and a couple of ways that my main characters could drive the plot to that ending. Then... something happened. I started to stray from my original idea and it was bugging the crap out of me. Why can't I just write this? Why do I keep straying? Who the hell is this character I've just created out of thin air? As you can see, I had a lot of questions and lots of extra things were coming into my head that were totally unprecedented. So, as you will know from my previous blogs (because you've read them all, I'm sure), I just wanted to write a book from start to finish, not worrying about plot holes, etc. to let myself know that I CAN DO THIS! Too many GIFs? Sorry... ANYWAY... Alas, my perfectionist nature and thirst for knowledge led me to put in an imperial tonne of research into things like: writing techniques; overcoming writers block; writing dynamic dialogue; point-of-view writing; building tension... basically all of the things that I didn't really need to learn about until I had mastered the basics. This brings me to the wonderful world of outlining and story-boarding. Ladies and gents, I can honestly say that this has changed my world. I had already written four chapters that stopped dead in their tracks because, guess what... I didn't know where the hell they were going to. I knew about my end goal and I was learning more and more about my characters as I've been writing. So it's not all bad and I've learned a lot in three-or-four months from the point I started out on this wild adventure into my, supposedly psychopathic, subconscious. My wife kindly bought me home a wad of large post-it notes the other day and the book has already transformed. I composed out a timeline in my writer's journal, and jotted down references to scenes that I wanted to take place and where (or when, whichever way you look at it) they should appear on the timeline. So, next I grabbed hold of the post-it notes and used them as a flip board. Not detaching a single one and I wrote scene after scene, after scene, after scene. I've read back over what I had written and discovered plot holes... so I jotted down solutions. Without worrying about sequence I continued to write (and it's not even finished but I had to share this with you) and I've added so many different ways to drive the plot forward that I started to think... Is this too much? Is there too much going on? You might be thinking the same. Am I putting too many ideas down? What if I can't link these up? To answer those two questions are: No, keep at it and write as much as you like; secondly... can't link it? Take the darned thing out... you obviously don't need it. The beauty is that these post-it notes (other brands are available) aren't just pieces of paper with your chicken-scratch all over them. Each one represents an idea, a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that is your novel. You might occasionally get a piece in there from another puzzle that's found it's way into the box. Don't toss it away, put it aside... you might be able to re-use it later in your next piece of work. In conclusion, my opinion is that you can never write too much down to start with. The trick is being able to whittle it down to what fits your story! That's a whole different ball-game that I'm not even going to pretend to understand yet. I'll touch on that when I get there. Thanks for reading... let me know what you think. Until next time!
1 Comment
Nina
29/8/2017 09:01:41 pm
I love reading your blogs and I'm looking forward to reading your novel.
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Hi, I'm Phil Williams. Welcome to my blog.
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